Http vs. https in Google

I looked around for some answers on this, but couldn't find anything definitive. Is https a penalty, an advantage, or neutral for Google indexing? I notice, for example, that many of the sun dot com pages are https, and Google indexes them fine.

Note that there are good reasons for public pages to be https. https is not just for security, but also to protect authenticity and integrity. If a page is https from sun dot com, it means that it really was published by Sun.

Well You are right, Https means Secured by SSL layer.

Generally https pages are made to secure the transactions and passwords. SEO wise https is generally used in sites those are shopping cart based, banking, credit cards etc. and crawlers are not allowed not to reach in those areas.

It has a seperate folder in the FTP as well as on the Server. If bots enter this area, username and passwords inclluding credit card numbers will be available through cached versions.

But if its applied on a normal static site.. its almost similar to notmal http website and URL's can get cralwed by the bots.

Another Point, If you have some content at a page .. say https://abc.com/abc.html
and is allowed to crawl by the bots, and again the same content conten is available on http://abc.com/abc.html , they will be treated as two seperate URL's with same content there by throwing one of the pages in to supplemental.

Https like u said is ofcourse a sign of authenticity and encryption, however, if a page is published by sun.com weather its https or http, till everything is copyright protected, its authentic..(I am assuming BH and fake copyrights are negligible)

Trust factor is there among visitors in both the cases, but its more when transactions go online..

Hope that helps ya..

Regards
LKS

http - Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, the actual communications protocol that enables Web browsing
https- same as http but HTTP Over SSL. Protocol enabling the secured transmission of Web pages

Regardless of the back end technology of a URL is reachable and the spider can index it, plane jane HTML is still returned to the client requesting the resource so plane jane HTML over HTTPS is the same as over HTTP, one is just encrypted through the transmission.

I don't believe that search engines will treat HTTPS any different to HTTP, the only thing being that HTTPS sites due to the nature of their SSL requirements dictate that they are inherantly unfriendly to search engine spiders and any other un authorised users.

I have some pages with https and mostly they're supplemental.. as lovekills says,, they were treated as seperate URLs.. is it really true? can robots.txt help me with this supplemental prob?

That's not true at all. SSL is not inherently unfriendly, and in fact, it would be smart if spiders would look at certs and prefer to crawl authenticated pages. It's also not true that "sun.com" is a guarantee of authenticity. sun.com could be spoofed, DNS could be hijacked, IP traffic could be hijacked, etc. DNS, as deployed, is not a secure or authenticated protocol. The SSL cert signs the HTML page and binds it to the certificate holder, by means of a certificate authority. SSL can be used without encryption. Authorization and authenticity are totally separate security needs, and SSL can handle one or both of them.

As for spiders, it's just as easy to spider a set of https pages as http because it is all HTML.

But thanks for the info about crawlers. I guess there is no benefit and some crawlers might decline to crawl them for whatever reason.

As for robots.txt and supplemental pages: interesting question.